Obituary- Courtney Tower, who worked for Reuters in London and Asia during a six-decade career

On Nov. 5, 1959, Tower was idly walking along the Thames Embankment when a young lad appeared as if out of nowhere with a scrawny hand outstretched, asking for “a penny for the Guy.”

Tower gave the youngster a few pennies, limiting his available cash considerably, and continued on his way to look up a Canadian friend in the iconic Reuters building at 85 Fleet Street.

It was his introduction to England and to Guy Fawkes Night, a far cry from the wheat farm he grew up on and the one-room school he attended in the tiny town of Norquay in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan.

At 27, he had just arrived in London after 13 months travelling from Vancouver to Yokohama, then throughout Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the UK.

“I was broke, by then,” Tower said during an interview in 2020. “I hadn’t nearly the price of a boat back to Canada.”

So, he called on an old mate: Reuters Nordesker Mel Morris, who with wife Shirley had also studied journalism at Carleton, a university in Canada’s capital Ottawa. Morris got him an interview and due to his previous newsroom experience in Canada, he was hired on the spot and started work immediately.

“I was rescued,” Tower said. “I went onto the Nordesk to join others who had come to London from the United States and Canada to work on that desk, essentially as rewritemen.”

The team, led by editor Don Ferguson, included Allan Fotheringham, Charles (Chuck) Frankel, Bill Harcourt, Jack Hartzman, Al Hunter, Dick Lyons, George Montgomery, Keith Power, Ed Rosenthal and Larry Thaw.  

They selected and rewrote the daily run of worldwide stories that poured into the fourth floor Central Desk for the North American audience.

“Wages were as sparse as the conditions on the floor,” said Tower. At the time, small pay packet envelopes containing loose change were handed out through a kiosk-style window.

Sometime later, Tower was tasked with setting up the Latin America service, mainly using the Nordesk output. Argentinian newspaper El Mundo was the only client.

To beef up his skills, Tower took language classes at the Spanish embassy. There he met his future wife, Celine, a student at the University of London, to whom he remained married until her death in 2014.

In 1962, Reuters transferred them to Karachi. He covered West Pakistan, now Pakistan, and East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. He also covered stories in India and Ceylon, now Sri Lanka.

He was sent to Saigon for several months in 1965 during the Vietnam war.

“I remember attending the twilight execution of a Viet Cong supporter; they took him, dull and unresisting, from an army vehicle to a square in Saigon and shot him,” Tower recalled in an article he wrote to mark his retirement from the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery in Ottawa at age 88. “The whole town was sullen all that day leading to the execution; you could feel the pall. It was obvious even then the war couldn’t be won. Air strikes might pound the villages, but you weren’t going to defeat guerrillas that could melt into the bush.”

Soon after returning to London from Vietnam, in 1966, Tower and his wife moved to Ottawa, where he became a correspondent with Time magazine, mainly covering parliamentary politics.

“Courtney was a superb reporter,” said Robert Lewis, author of Power, Prime Ministers and the Press, who also worked at Time. “Beyond that he was thoughtful, with an iconoclastic streak that challenged conventional views on a story.”

After a stint at Maclean’s, which was at the time Canada’s national newsmagazine, Tower moved into parliamentary communications, working his way up to the prime minister’s office, where he served as an adviser.

“In government, having crossed to the ‘dark side’ as a self-described ‘agent of spin’ in Pierre Trudeau's press office, he was truthful in his dealing with reporters and exhorted public servants to speak truth to power,” said Lewis, who later became Maclean’s editor-in-chief.  

Throughout his career Tower also wrote for British United Press, Reader’s Digest, the Victoria Daily Colonist, Journal of Commerce and the Financial Times.

He is survived by his daughter Amanda and son Courtney (C.P.), granddaughter Samara Tower, and his sisters Diana and Cecilia.

(Photo courtesy of Amanda Tower)

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